


We're Coming For Ya, Girl

by Eiiri



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Opportunity Rover - Fandom, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Rescue the Mars Rover, Casual Space Travel, Fix-It, Gen, Happy Scientists, I'll Be Thinking of You, Oppy lives!, Rescue, Tony Stark is a Softy, Wish Fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 16:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17832209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eiiri/pseuds/Eiiri
Summary: Tony is absolutely not going to get all worked up over the Mars rover going dark fifteen years after it was expected to--but then he does, and then he's gathered a team for a spur of the moment rescue mission to the red planet.  Matt Damon, eat your heart out.





	We're Coming For Ya, Girl

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my dear friend over at HowToDreamOfDragons on tumblr, because she asked me to, and when I told her I'm pretty sure there are several of these sorts of fics online, pointed out that I hadn't written any of them.  
> Frankly, after that, I had no choice. So, here, enjoy this happier reality.

Tony had already read the news. He'd taken a deep breath, closed his phone, put it face down on the table, and occupied himself with some particularly delicate micro-soldering. He was going to be sensible, for once, and he certainly wasn't going to cry over a robot that wasn't even sentient and wasn't even his. It wasn't like this was Dum-E...who'd been facing the wall, servos whirring quietly while he lethargically sorted the same bin of transistors for going on three hours. Tony Stark was absolutely not going to get sucked up in the grief-meme zeitgeist that had overtaken the internet. It was all put on anyway, it wasn't as though anyone actually cared.

At least, that's what Tony had managed to convince himself until he emerged from his workshop for lunch, and walked into the compound kitchen to find a stone-faced Bucky with one arm around Peter who was ugly crying into his phone, Steve leaning against his other shoulder, red-eyed, and, on the other side of the counter, Thor, Pietro, Wanda, and Vision holding hands in a line while the twins murmured what Tony was _pretty sure_ was the mourner's kaddish,Billie Holiday's “I'll Be Seeing You” playing over the sound system. Tony stopped, feeling distinctly as though he'd been punched in the throat.

He took a breath. “Thor, can I borrow you for a minute?”

 

~*~

 

Pepper stood in the doorway, taking in the scene before her: Tony, Bruce, Thor, Peter, and Dum-E diligently loading up a stolen alien spacecraft with toolkits and cleaning supplies with all the determination and duty of first responders to a disaster zone. “Where are you going?”

“Mars,” they all, other than Dum-E, said.

“Uhhuh.” Pepper nodded. “Why?”

“Because,” Tony said, “NASA doesn't have the budget or resources to go save Oppy, but _we_ do.”

Pepper tilted her head. “Oppy?”

“The Opportunity rover!” Peter exclaimed. His eyes were almost as puffy from crying as Bruce's but he was vibrating with barely contained excitement. “They've been calling her Oppy for years. She's stuck. We're super heroes, and, I mean, we've all been to space before.”

“Right, of course,” Pepper sighed, remembering the headlines she'd barely had a chance to glance at. “I feel obligated to try to talk you out of jetting off to Mars, but I don't believe for a second it wound make any difference.”

“None whatsoever,” Thor confirmed.

“We're going to rescue Spirit, too, if we can find her,” Bruce added. “The other rover.”

Pepper laughed softly and shook her head. “Well, good luck, be careful. Tony, you owe me a Valentine's dinner.”

“I have already changed our reservation!”

 

~*~

 

The wonderful thing about having stolen alien technology and an alien expat who happens to be a pretty damn good pilot on hand is that it makes a trip to Mars about as convenient as a trip to Nebraska—so, not convenient at all, but readily doable if you needed to.

Peter had downloaded NASA's “Opportunity, wake up!” playlist to his phone and was humming along to “Here Comes the Sun” while he, Tony, and Bruce double and triple checked first Oppy's last known coordinates, then Spirit's.

Dum-E bumped into Tony's shoulder and he gave the robot a casual pat.

“We're comin' for ya, girl,” Peter muttered to the screen in front of him.

“Hell, yeah, we are,” Bruce agreed.

 

They landed with a lurch and a crunch that woke Tony from his nap, dumped Peter onto the floor, and had Bruce flailing to grip his seat with one hand and grab onto Dum-E with the other. Thor looked sheepishly around from the pilot's seat. “Sorry. We're here.”

“It's go time,” Tony said, stretching and cuing his latest Iron Man suit to envelop him. It took a little longer to get the other three into space suits, but once they had, they stepped into the ship's airlock/decontamination chamber,then out into the Martian desert, tool boxes and cleaning buckets in hand, Dum-E trundling behind them with a broom and a robot pack saddle of equipment.

Off, a couple hundred yards away, half buried in dust, was their damsel in distress, her panoramic camera mast sticking up, the only recognizable detail between the distance and the dirt.

“It looks like...Arizona,” Peter observed as they walked, voice a bit tinny through their headsets.

“I was going to say Nevada, but yeah,” Tony agreed.

“My thought was Nigeria” Bruce said, “but same idea.”

Thor shrugged. “It looks like Mars.”

“Oh, shut up,” Tony chided.

Peter lifted his canister of cleaning wipes to the sky and called, “You hang in there, Oppy! We gotcha!” Several long minutes later, he fell to his knees in the sand in front of the truck-sizedrover. “Okay,” he breathed, “walking long distances in low G is, uh, weird, but we made it.”

Tony took the broom from Dum-E and began the process of carefully unburying the bot. Once they'd cleared the sand away—and gotten Dum-E unstuck again because, “You are supposed to be helping, not turning into another casualty!”—they set about the even more delicate process of cleaning her off.

“We maybe didn't think this through super well,” Peter observed, shaking dust out of a bone dry cleaning wipe. “Everything's evaporated.”

“In my experience,” Thor said, reaching up with what was _definitely_ a makeup brush to clean off Opportunity'spancam, “introducing moisture to this much dust only serves to produce mud. It may be just as well.”

Tony reached into Dum-E's pack and produced a pair of reinforced compressed air canisters, which he twirled like a gunslinger, then handed to Peter and Bruce. Then he flipped open a couple fingertips and resumed repairing what components had failed in the dust storm and the cold without power to keep Oppy's protective heaters running.

When they'd finished and Opportunity's solar panels were gleaming in the Martian sunlight, Dum-E stuck a small heart-shaped sticker on her mast where her cameras couldn't see, andthey stepped back.

“Friday,” Tony said, holding one hand out toward Opportunity, “give her a jump and something to do with herself.”

With a surge of power from the suit, Oppy whirred to life, servos adjusting, and began to roll toward a nearby rock formation.

Peter screamed with joy, jumping up and down. Bruce grabbed Tony and Thor in a rough hug. Thor returned the embrace, laughing. Tony gave Dum-E a high five. They watched proudly as Opportunity resumed her life's work, all tearing up a little inside their helmets, then turned to walk back to their ride to go find her twin, Tony bringing up the rear in flight, using his thrusters to wipe away their footprints.

 

It was a comparatively short jaunt across the red planet to find Spirit, but the mountainous terrain made parking, then actually locating the other rover significantly more problematic. When they finally found her, she was half buried just like her sister, but she had also fallen partway down a craggy embankment and was lodged on her side.

Standing at the edge of the embankment, looking down at the trapped, damaged, and lifeless rover, Tony let out a breath. “Okay, step one: put her somewhere flat.”

“Probably not up here,” Bruce said. “We don't want hertaking the same fall twice.”

“Right,” Tony agreed.

Between Thor being, well, Thor, Peter being freakishly strong, thank you radioactive spider, and Tony being mechanically enhanced, they managed—with moral support from Bruce and Dum-E—to get Spirit up on her wheels on the flat-ish patch at the bottom of the embankmentwhere they set about cleaning her up and making the extensive repairs she needed, starting with the wheel she'd broken so many years ago in 2006 and given up hope of ever working again.

They had one failed attempt at reviving her, then another, then another. Out of ideas, Peter sat dejectedly on a rock, one arm around Dum-E and watched Tony and Bruce continue to try.

Eventually, Tony crawled out from under Spirit, brushed the dust off himself best he could, and said, “Okay, maybe fourth time's the charm. Friday, let's give it a go.”

For a terrible breath-holding second, nothing happened, then, just like her sister had hours before, Spirit reanimated with a chorus of electromechanical buzzes.

“There we go!” Tony crowed.

Peter leapt to his feet with a whoop. Bruce punched Thor's shoulder excitedly. Thor returned the punch, nearly knocking Bruce over, then clapped Tony on the back. “You've done it. You've saved them.”

Tony shook his head. “No. _We've_ saved them. As much I love to take credit for everything, this was a group effort. We did it.”

Thor grinned broadly.

Smiling so hard it hurt, Peter nodded back the way they'd come. “Let's go home.”

 

As they approached Earth and came back into easy communication range, Tony pulled out his phone, scrolled through his contacts, and dialed Steve Squyres. It rang a few times before the line picked up, “Tony, did you call the wrong Steve again?”

“No, no,” Tony chuckled, “I changed Cap's name back to Capsicle in my phone, solved that problem. I was hoping you could do me favor.”

“That's going to depend on the favor.”

“Could you try and ping your rovers?” Tony asked, grinning at Bruce and Peter listening in intently.

There was a pause at the other end. “Why?”

“No reason, really, I just feel like it's worth one last shot. I have a hunch.”

“I'll...call you back.”

 

They got back to the compound to find the whole team, plus Pepper and Phil, waiting for them.

“Well?” Wanda asked expectantly. “Did you save her?”

Before anyone could answer, Tony's phone rang. He held up a finger, accepted the call, and was greeted by the joyous, bewildered screams of a whole room full of scientists.


End file.
